Professor Leda Cooks: Exploring Identity

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Leda Cooks, professor of communication, will be teaching a six credit thesis seminar: Comm 499AA Communication and Identity during the 2024 spring semester. This seminar will focus the critical study of identity to political, intercultural, spiritual and intersectional issues, and interconnected social and environmental problems. 

Cooks explained that students have the option to do a traditional thesis or a portfolio project. While the two projects are not exactly the same, there are commonalities between the two, such as extensive background research. 

The portfolio project itself often encourages students to work with community organizations. 

“In the past, students have done work with social media for an organization where they designed the whole campaign for a particular event. And then also as part of that social media, they included research that they had been doing to get the broader public aware of, in this case, both food recovery and food access…Another project was doing an overview of  how the organization functioned by looking at the different aspects of what the particular community organization was doing and how they were working together.” 

Cooks shared that the concept of identity is purposefully a broad topic, she wants all students to be able to have an understanding of how the idea of self and identity developed and where it came from and how it can relate to students’ own work. 

Another objective of the seminar is to prepare students to articulate their work to a broader audience. Each student will be required to present their work at the Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference. This is a wonderful opportunity for students to showcase the extensive work they have done on a topic they have found a deep interest in. 

Presenting at a large research conference such as this is a great skill to hone. Not only will students have the chance to improve upon this skill but, depending on the project they choose, they could learn organizational communication, media crafting, academic writing and application of theory as well.

Cooks also shared that in order for incoming students to be prepared for the class they should have a good idea of what they’d like to focus on. The class will move steadily and follow a set timeline. Cooks does this to ensure students are prepared for their MassURC presentation and have their thesis completed by the end of the semester.  

If you are interested in joining the six credit seminar be sure to leda [at] comm [dot] umass [dot] edu (contact Leda Cooks).